Biographer of Midcentury American Novelists

The Negro Travelers’ Guide: For Those Seeking a Welcome

The Negro Travelers’ Green Book was a dignified response to racism. An essay by Carvell Wallace talks about what it meant to be traveling while Black in the two Americas. Above, Gordon Parks photographed segregated Dayton Beach, Florida in 1943.

“The fact that the American Dream presents two very different faces depending on the color of yours is why Victor H. Greene created the Negro Motorist Green Book in 1936….He developed a solution to what he termed the ’embarrassment’ that comes with being refused service for the color of your skin. Greene created a travel guide that listed all the restaurants, filling stations, museums, hotels, guest homes, grocery stores and establishments that readers would feel safe being Black in. The Green Book, as it was affectionately known by Black families, began publishing annually in 1936 and ran for 28 years, growing steadily in listings and readership, and becoming a staple in Black homes. The final issue ran in 1964, by which time the combined forces of the Civil Rights Act and the development of the freeway system made it easier to avoid uncomfortable stops, rendering the book theoretically obsolete.”

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Revised and Updated! Book-of-the-Month Club Alternate Literary Guild Selection Junior Literary Guild Selection New York Times bestseller An extensively revised and updated edition of the bestselling biography of Harper Lee, reframed from the perspective of the recent publication of Lee’s Go Set a Watchman To Kill a Mockingbird—the twentieth century’s most widely read American novel—has […]

Like this:

Buy This Book Online

Find A Local Bookstore

Imagine

From acclaimed literary biographer of Kurt Vonnegut and Harper Lee comes the life story of a song, one of the most iconic ever written: John Lennon’s “Imagine”. “Twenty-two lines of graceful, plain-spoken faith in the power of a world to repair and change itself,” said Rolling Stone. Only 183 seconds long, the simple melody and […]